Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Into the Land of the Elves: The Writing Teacher

The
Diary of Miss Aidyn Hall, friend of the Jadeites

August
19

6:15
PM

The
Writing Teacher

Today
we would be reaching the conclusion of the knight and the fairy queen
story, so I decided that we could start on one of my novels, A
Dragon's Pride. When
I showed the book to Apple Blossom, she was instantly drawn to the
digitally-illustrated book jacket and the white bold print used for
the title. Jadeite books are printed on rudimentary hand-crafted
presses and illustrated with painted images that you can feel the
paint on if you trace over them with your finger. Apple Blossom
probably spent a good ten minutes just looking at the book jacket,
marveling over the typed words, and tracing her own finger over the
illustration of a dragon looking out over the land from a plateau.
“You're supposed to read the book,
Apple
Blossom,” I teased, “not the cover!”

“I know,” Apple Blossom said.
“It's just that this is more of a work of art than just a book.”

“Humans consider their books to be
works of art,” I said. “Now let's get started, shall we?”

For
a writer, there is no better feeling than knowing that other people
are interested in and even like the things that you write. In fact,
interest and praise from others can drastically change your own
perception of your writing. I've always considered A
Dragon's Pride to
be mediocre; good enough to read when you have nothing else to. The
fact that other people liked the book enough to buy it did nothing to
increase my own enjoyment of the story. As I've said before, I very
rarely enjoy my own stories.

But
as I read the story to Apple Blossom and she took it all in with her
characteristic interest and enthusiasm—asking questions, making
comments, smiling, laughing, even interrupting to spin entire
conversations before I veered us back into the reading—I realized
that A Dragon's
Pride
wasn't mediocre at all. It was interesting. It was entertaining. It
was a real page-turner. It brought smiles to the faces of its readers
and inspired questions in their minds. The narrator, a dragon named
Uglorr who lived in a world where dragons were few and far between,
was a likable character that made readers care about him enough to
make comments on his narration and his goings-on. When we made it to
the end of the chapter, I learned that he was the kind of character
that made a reader ask what was going to happen to him next, and his
story was the kind of story that produced the question, “When can I
hear more?”

“Tomorrow,” I told Apple
Blossom, and my own excitement to continue made me positively giddy.
“We'll read a chapter every day, all right?”

“Okay,” said Apple Blossom. “Are
you going to read more from your diary too?”

Aw
man! I had hoped that A
Dragon's Pride would
get her mind off of the diary for a while. “Not today, sweetie,”
I told her. “There are some things in it that are very personal, so
I'll have to find something that it's okay for you to hear.”
Sometimes, I marvel at my ability to cover up the truth without
actually telling a lie. Apple Blossom accepted this answer without
any further questions or comments.

As
I worked at my writing, Apple Blossom was uncharacteristically quiet;
usually she bombards me with questions and comments about what I'm
writing. But today, she was sitting on the floor and drawing by the
light that filtered in through the stained glass window, and her
silence gave me some time to think in that private corner of my mind
where all of my non-writing thoughts go to congregate while I'm
working. I was thinking about what Apple Blossom had said about
“human magic.” Taking photographs was as magical to her as
changing the colors of cranberry greens was to me. TVs, computers,
phones—all perfectly ordinary things in my world—were magical to
her. These things were created by skillful humans who had worked hard
at shaping and perfecting their skills, in the same way that the
Jadeites spend their lives learning to manipulate the jade essences
into usable forms of magic. What other forms of human magic were
there? What other forms had I myself even performed without realizing
it? I thought of her reaction to the fully illustrated,
digitally-printed cover of A
Dragon's Pride; did
she think of the book as a work of magic rather than simply a work of
art? How magical was it that we could produce so many copies at one
time, to be read by hundreds or even thousands of people at once?

My thoughts were interrupted when a
servant escorted Wildflower into the room, and the silence was broken
when Apple Blossom ran to greet her. I set my pen down for a moment
and waved. She was carrying her treasured diary in one hand and a
wood-carved pencil in another. “Let's go outside, Wildflower,”
Apple Blossom said. “We can play Roundabout. You come too, Aidyn!”

“Give me a moment to finish a few
sentences,” I said. “I'll meet you both out there.”

Roundabout is a strange game that
resembles tag, Duck Duck Goose, and Ring of Roses all at once. You
join hands and pull eachother around in a circle, the whole time
trying to break out while you're being pulled. Once someone breaks
out, those still in the circle have to chase them down and try to
pull them back in. It's absolutely mindless fun, produces the silly
giggles in a matter of seconds, and I absolutely love it. After we
played that for a while, we sailed the little flower boats that Apple
Blossom had made over the Bell's Rush, and then Wildflower wanted to
show me some of the magic that she could do: she spun the air around
us into rose-scented breezes that tickled my face, and she
transformed a few old blades of switchgrass into colorful boughs of
cherry, plum, and apple blossoms. As she sat waving one around in the
air and no doubt thinking over what she would like to do next, I got
an idea. “Wildflower,” I said, “would you like me to teach you
how to write the way I do?”

“Yes!” Wildflower answered
immediately. “Yes, teach me!”

I led her over to the garden table
where Apple Blossom often had her lessons and where we often had our
lunches. “We're going to need some blank paper,” I told her. “Can
you tear two blank pages out of the back of your diary for me?” She
did so, and I laid them out in front of her and wrote out the
alphabet, both in capitals and in lowercase:

“Okay, Wildflower,”
I said to her, “I want you to look over these letters for a while.
This is the most commonly-used human alphabet—most of the human
languages use these same twenty-six letters to write.”

“Only these?” she
said quizzically.

“Only these,” I
told her. “Does your writing alphabet use a lot more letters than
these?”

She looked at me as if
tufts of fur had just grown out of my ears. “They just make words,”
she said, and then it was my turn to be confused. “You don't write
with letters?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “we
write letters with words.”

I left it at that and
moved on: “Well, these twenty-six letters make up every word in the
English language—the one that I speak and write—as well as many
other human languages. I don't know any other languages, so we're
only going to worry about English words.”

“You speak Common,”
Wildflower said, “like I do.”

“Yes,” I said, “but
humans call it English. I told you that before, remember?”

“So every word has
all of these in them?” Wildflower asked, looking over the letters
as if trying to unlock their secrets.”

“Well, not every word
has every letter,” I clarified, “but every word has some of these
letters.” She was giving me that look again, so I said, “Here,
let me give you an example. I'm going to use these letters to write
your name.”

“My name is
Wildflower,” she told me matter-of-factly.

“I haven't forgotten,
dear,” I said, patting her on the head. “So, I'm going to write
it using these letters.” I wrote the name underneath the line of
letters:

WILDFLOWER

“That's my name?”
she asked, as astonished as if she had laid eyes on a unicorn. “Yes,”
I said, “that's your name.” I pointed to each letter as I named
them off: “W-I-L-D-F-L-O-W-E-R spells Wildflower. Your name has ten
letters in it—that's a pretty big name for such a little girl.
Would you like me to show you how to write the letters that make your
name?”

Wildflower was a
diligent student. She followed my patient directions with the quiet
enthusiasm she was known for, without any question, comment, or
protest. The only problem arose when she discovered that she liked W
and L better than any of the other letters, and I had to direct her
onto the next letter with some disappointment on her part. “I'm
glad that you like W and L,” I told her. “After all, they are the
only letters that appear more than once in your name. But as I said,
your name has ten letters in it, not just two!”

Apple Blossom
interrupted us before she could fully grasp the writing of her name.
“What are you two doing over here?” she asked when she found us
sitting at the table writing instead of playing.

“That's wonderful!”
chirped Apple Blossom. “But it isn't lesson time! We ought to be
playing! Come and climb with me, please! It gets awfully lonely way
up in a tree all by yourself.”

“How can I argue with
that?” I said, chuckling a little. “Come on, Wildflower, let's go
give her some company at the top of that big tree.”

She
set the pencil down and took off running, and the three of us entered
a race that neither me nor Wildflower had any chance of winning
(though I was nice enough to lag behind so that Wildflower could take
second place). I climbed up to the middle branches of the tree, and
there I sat and I thought. It
isn't lesson time, Apple
Blossom had chided us. She had regular lessons with Beryl in the
mornings throughout the week. I wasn't entirely sure how the Jadeite
education system worked; Jadeite kids don't attend school like human
kids do. But do all Jadeite children have private teachers like
Beryl, or was that a privilege for the royalty and aristocracy? Was
Wildflower going to have a teacher someday when she was older?

Or...could I be her
teacher?

Wildflower is the kind
of eager, dutiful student that every teacher wants to have. She
listens patiently, follows directions, rarely gets sidetracked and is
easily redirected when she does, and above all, she looks up to me
like I'm some kind of sage of knowledge. If anything, I could be her
unofficial writing teacher. I had already taught her how to use a
diary, I had already inspired her to take up and to love writing—and
a mentor's duty, first and foremost, is to inspire.

I looked at Wildflower,
who was sitting right beside me and playing with a butterfly that had
perched on her finger. I had a feeling that she was going to write
about that butterfly. She was going to write about this day. She was
going to write about the nice human that had taught her to write
those Ws and Ls that she liked so much.

About Me

I'm Star Nova, and I like to tell stories. This blog used to be more topical, but then just became a place where I could easily hold my stories. I have several short stories and two big works in progress, as well as some old crap and some pending revisions OF some old crap.
I write in order to share how I see the world, from my own perspective. If you're here, you're probably here from Tumblr or Twitter. I hope you like my stories. And if you don't, I hope you at least read them before you decide that. (: